Unfinished
by Ithinkyoullknxw
Summary: You walk away to ease his pain and your guilt and any sanity either of you kept but you'll never know how he copes when you leave your home for another. Or perhaps, how he doesn't.


_The worst endings are when things dont end at all_

What is a wedding day without a bride? What is a wedding day with a broken groom? Why had she been so sure she had been looking for nothing but looking for him all at once if she would make him hers and then leave? She breaks herself more all the time and she waits until it is too late for anyone to do anything other than cut themselves on her broken pieces.

He is her person.

He is her emergency contact on hospital forms, he is the first person she wants to tell when something good happens or something bad happens or when nothing happens at all. He is the person she thinks of when she sees a loved up couple, he is the first thing she needs when she is sad or happy or anything inbetween.

A lot of people have come into her life and changed her. Changed her for the good, changed her for the worse but changed her all the same. People believing in her when no one else did, people letting her down when she believed they never would, never could. People hurt her, bend her, alter her.

But he has left a mark that is more than a change. More than fingerprints on wine glasses and on her skin and on her heart. He has become imbedded in her, more a part of her than she is herself. He is a pang of wanting, a desperate longing, a lifetime of unfinished

Even his name pulls at her very being. As though the thought of leaving him behind is like leaving herself behind and it's so very scary because she was never whole to start with. They are unfinished. They had started as unexpected, unwilling and now they dont end at all. They are just fractured, broken and completely incomplete.

The night before your wedding you are meant to spend apart. The bride should stay with her bridesmaids, perhaps painting their nails over champagne and talking about where things have gone wrong and how they've gone right. For Carla, things have rarely gone right.

The groom, with his men. A few beers and last minute cold feet, talks about how his glory days are over and that freedom will soon be lost.

But he hadn't minded when his fiancé had begged that she they stayed home that night. She didn't care about good luck charms and traditions or bad omens. Carla just wanted Nick. And he had obliged. They had curled up in bed, her head under his chin, her hair tucked behind her ears, her eyes closed as she took him in. She held him tight, fingertips along her back soothingly like nothing else mattered. In that moment, it didn't.

She had hidden. She had locked the door to their flat, tipped the champagne he poured her down the sink when he wasn't looking and made love to him in their bed all night long.

He had thought it had been perfect. He had thought they were different, avoiding fancy norms and ridiculous rules and being so very them.

The curtains of their flat had been half opened when she'd woken. Left untouched because of so many other all too important things but even they were left unsaid. Even if they had been given their lifetime together, things would always be unsaid. Closing them had seemed trivial at the time but that morning, the curtains were all she could focus on. While she listened to the sound of her almost husbands breathing she realised she could never go back. She couldn't go back to last night and close the curtains, she couldn't alter her mistake. Not leaving the curtains open, not making him love her, not anything at all.

Nick was going to live with those unclosed curtains for the rest of his life and she would never forgive herself for that.

* * *

You never remember the last time, because you don't know it is the last time. You think you have more, you think there's time and there's not.

Things end, and you don't remember the lasts.

That is all Nick can think about as he reads her letter that was laying on the pillow beside him on their wedding day where she should have been and where she never will be again. He doesn't note where she has gone or her confession of guilt or the admission of pregnancy to another man or even her absolute despair.

He cannot remember the last thing he said to her or the last moment she kissed him or he kissed her or if he held her til she fell asleep. Had he kissed her head like he always did before they settled or had he drifted off first, leaving her alone with a plague of regret.

She, of course, had known since the moment she drunkenly stumbled out of the hotel bed she had shared with Robert, a numbness in her body and in her mind and in her heart, that she couldn't marry Nick.

Her problem was she cared too much about him and she didn't care about herself at all. So she would not give him a chance to forgive her, she would not let him lead half a life. A life of questions and mistrust. She would walk away and she would remember what he wouldn't.

She would remember how soft his lips had felt as he lay half asleep, their skin hot and their kisses gentle. She would remember how he whispered her name and his name as one because it was so tangible now, so in reach. She would never forget the colour of his eyes or the way his chest rose and fell calmly as he slept.

He wouldn't remember their lasts, but she wouldn't forget.

She knows now thay that's what happens when you are broken, you break other people along the way. You dust yourself down and you pick yourself up and then everything you know will happen but hope that it won't, happens. Again. You're down on the floor and you're self-destruscting and sometimes your damage is unrepairable.

That is what you have left him with, unrepairable damage. A hole that you should have filled, so much love with no one to give it to. An empty finger on his left hand with the space he was saving for you and him and the thing you called your future. You have left him with fingerprints and smudges and a mark that is always unfinished.

You walk away to ease his pain and your guilt and any sanity either of you kept but you'll never know how he copes when you leave your home for another.

Or perhaps, how he doesn't.


End file.
